The big interview with Paul Rouse: Why is the greatest game played by so few?
Paul Rouse is an accidental academic, but a fascination with history deepened into a passion when it merged with his love of sport. His new book, ‘The Hurlers’, charts the birth of the modern game in that first All-Ireland final 131 years ago. He marvels at what a few visionary hurling men gave the country, but can’t help think that hurling has since failed at least half that country
OF all the modules in all the courses in all the colleges in Ireland, Paul Rouse probably offers and teaches the most fascinating of the lot.
Every Monday at four o’clock, 20 first-year students will convene with him in a small room on the fifth floor of the library in UCD and take a class on the History of Muhammad Ali.
It’s all in there. They’re all in there. From MLK, Malcolm X and LBJ to LeBron, Kaepernick and Trump today; Black Power to Black Lives Matter; I’m Gonna Dance to Yes We Can and I Can’t Breathe. It’s America. It’s Vietnam. Race. War. Religion. Gender.
And sport. It’s a big one too, when you think about it.
“If you look at what people do outside working and sleeping, what do they engage in?” asks Rouse. “What do they think about, what do they talk about? Well, for a lot of people, sport drives their engagement in public life and civil society.
“So why wouldn’t history, which is concerned with what forces impact the social and cultural lives of people, not investigate sport? It would be almost perverse that it wouldn’t.”
And yet, not that long ago, it was virgin territory in Ireland, certainly not a field Rouse thought he could carve out a precious academic career and post in. Just as he was something of an accidental manager for Offaly this past summer, he’s something of an accidental sports historian too.
He liked history in school alright, so much so that he studied it outside of school; it clashed with French, the language he took to get into college, so he took the initiative to learn about Marx, Hitler and Dev on his own to sit it for the Leaving. In college he majored in it and the French. Still, by his own admission, he was a “very mediocre” student. Got four Cs in the Leaving with a D in English. An overall 2:2 in college. Barely scraped a 2:1 in history, though enough to be offered a masters.
“I wasn’t engaged. And I was spectacularly immature.”
He was 17 when he set foot on the UCD campus. Who, at that age, knows what they want to do with the rest of their life? He hadn’t a clue. Nowadays he goes around to schools advising kids and not just his own, that they should consider taking a year out after secondary school. “I would have got so much more out of my degree starting at 19. Rather than wandering into the place: Here I am now, entertain me.”
He was still in that frame of mind meeting his masters supervisor Professor Michael Laffan who asked what he might do for a thesis topic. Rouse shrugged. Dunno. Mumbled something about the IRA hunger strikes in The Curragh during World War Two. Sounded like the kind of worthy subject that would impress a fellow historian.
Laffan wasn’t buying it. Really? Why? Rouse couldn’t answer. Well, suggested Laffan, why don’t you do something you’re interested in? He’d seen Rouse going around with a hurley. Laffan wasn’t fond of sport himself but Rouse clearly was. Why didn’t he do something related to that?
In that moment a whole new world opened up. He went to the library and found a shelf of sports books that a visiting Australian professor from the ’80s called WF Mandle had ordered. Mandle had even written a book called the Gaelic Athletic Association and Irish Nationalist Politics: 1884-1923.
“Disagreed with a lot of it,” says Rouse, “but it’s a brilliant piece of work.”
Also on the shelf was Richard Holt’s Sport and the British, which included a section on Ireland because it had been part of the UK when the sporting world was being made. It was the first sports history book Rouse read and to this day, the best. He couldn’t put it down. He’d discovered a passion — and his thesis topic.
Soon he was in the frontroom of Tom Woulfe, the leading campaigner for the repeal of Rule 27, poring over his records and newspaper cuttings, researching the history of the GAA’s ban on foreign games.
Rouse is a huge admirer and supporter of the GAA. He played football and hurling for Tullamore. In his adopted home of Oliver St Plunkett’s, he helps out with coaching the U9s hurling and the U13 girls football, not to mention the hand he gave his native county when they were stuck for a manager during the summer. But his profession has taught him to take exception to some of the GAA’s exceptionalism.
“I’m a committed GAA person but the amount of crap we talk is hard to listen to at times.”
For one, it doesn’t have a monopoly on volunteerism, as much as it tends to infer that it has. Clubs in other sports also serve the community, with less resources and often more obstacles, some of them historically placed by the GAA.
During his masters he came across cases like Westport United, who in the ’50s, were given a grant of £125 from the local district council to develop their grounds. The GAA kicked up, lobbied the department of local environment and the grant was withdrawn. A ban that he learned started out as arguably a justified means to get people affiliated to the GAA morphed into something uglier.
“It wasn’t just enough for them to promote their own games and their own culture. They had to savage the opposition.”
Now, he’s just after producing another significant study of a more positive, if tumultuous, period in the history of the GAA. The Hurlers, published by Penguin Ireland, is a marvellous account of how within five years of Michael Cusack writing to a national newspaper lamenting the virtual extinction of the ancient game of hurling, an All-Ireland hurling championship was being run under the auspices of a remarkable new national organisation.
It’s a book that’s been over 20 years in the making. It started while working for the local papers, the Tullamore Tribune and Leinster Express. He’d cover the courts for them, write match reports, even ones he featured in himself.
“I had a bit of fun with that. It was a bit of a running joke with friends.”
In what way? He’d write himself up. “I once wrote the line ‘Cometh the hour, cometh the man!’”
One day in the office he came across a cutting about the first All-Ireland hurling final, which had been played just down the road in Birr, on April Fool’s Day, 1887.
And since then he’s been putting the material together, step-by-step, to tell the story of that day and those times. What Birr of 1887 was like, all the way out to the two teams — Thurles from Tipperary and Meelick representing Galway — that played in that final, to how the first championship was created and the ancient game of hurling was taken out of history.
It’s been, at times, an excruciating process, scouring every local newspaper from every county in which hurling was played in those years. But that was the reward too.
“You learn so much history. People now think you can use digital stuff with everything, just put the word ‘hurling’ into the search engine. But you don’t know the context that piece was written in. And if history is about anything, it’s context.
“Ireland in the 1880s was fascinating. Think about it. There’s a land war in progress; hurlers who are playing in these matches are in the process of being evicted from their farms. It looks like a Home Rule Bill, being led by William Gladstone, is going to get through the House of Parliament. Members of the Cork GAA board take a boat across to Wales to meet Gladstone and present him with a hurley and miniature ball. A splinter group from the Irish Republic Brotherhood bomb Downing Street.
“And while all this is happening, there are the lives people are leading. What drives history are the stories of people. And what drives this book is the stories of the people who made hurling.”
You can read and enjoy it for yourself. About Maurice Davin, “one of the great neglected figures in Irish history”, he argues, certainly prior to the late former GAA president Séamus Ó Riain penning a biography on him in the early ’90s and campaigning that the refurbished Canal End be renamed in his memory. Considering he codified the ancient game of hurling, the new game of football and drafted the constitution of the GAA, what more had he to do?
About Michael Cusack, “an undoubted genius” — conversant in French and Russian literature, could lecture on mathematics, ran a brilliant school and his own newspaper — but a troubled genius.
“What I knew nothing about before I started the book was his capacity to fall out with people was oceanic. The only person that I can find that Michael Cusack pulled back from fighting with was Maurice Davin.”
He died even alienated from his own surviving children, though they lived in a house in Phibsborough just three streets across from where he was a lodger.
Rouse finds that image a haunting one, possibly because the devastating effects of isolation, alcoholism and shame echoed with something he encountered in his earlier and remarkably varied working life.
Sometime before he finally nailed down a post in academia but a couple of years after working as a research assistant to Professor John A Murphy — “an incredible, fearless man” — he had returned to the fringes of journalism, serving as “a 30-year-old runner” for RTÉ’s Prime Time. After 9/11, when all hands were needed on deck, he was promoted to the role of researcher and when Prime Time Investigates was launched soon after, he was elevated to the role of reporter. He cringes at the memory.
“I was crap on telly. I was awful talking to camera so I did a lot of those reports without appearing on screen. I’m not saying that out of false modesty. I just wasn’t good at it.”
What he will give himself credit for is the documentary Lost Generation, about Irish men and women who went to England in the ’50s and ’60s and were too broke or ashamed to return home.
He spent three months going around the hostels and bedsits and old peoples’ support groups of London, Birmingham, Manchester, Coventry, all around the small towns of middle Britain. First, without his camera, hearing their stories, earning their trust; then with his camera, though all the women were too uncomfortable to go in front of it. The stories were wretched. Cusackian.
“You’d go to somewhere like Arlington House. Everyone knows and loves Camden Market. Well, just off it, there’s Arlington House where there’s 120 Irishmen staying, all essentially homeless, a lot of them suffering from alcoholism. But you know what? Often the overriding thing in someone’s life which destroys them is loneliness. And that was everywhere to be found.
“I think it changed me a bit, doing that story. Because the men I spoke with came from backgrounds and places no different to my own. I was just of a generation who had the good fortune to get free second-level education and that had a structure that allowed me to go to college. I met guys who went to England when they were 13 to look for work.
“I don’t think I fully appreciated, to that point, just how lucky I was. If anybody ever had a sense of entitlement, there would be nothing to destroy it like that experience.”
Which is partly why it angers and saddens him that a fundamental aspect of that education his generation was afforded has been recently diluted, even deleted. That history is no longer mandatory for the Junior Cert is something he describes as “a scandal”.
“If you want to fully appreciate the implications and the dangers of the ignorance of history, just look at Brexit and the sheer incompetence and the lack of basic knowledge of people as they talk about the past and present and don’t understand the connection between the two.”
He doesn’t just mean their ignorance of the Irish Question. “They don’t even know their own history!
“Take the two worst offenders in my view — [Jacob] Rees-Mogg and [Boris] Johnson. They routinely litter their speeches with historical allusions and analogies and stories. And it’s the classic example of the narrowness of a British public school education where they are able to throw these things in, stripped entirely of context.
“The idea that you can squeeze, as Rees-Mogg routinely does, centuries of history into a trite phrase shows exactly the importance of people understanding what the real history is, so they can listen to someone who is a complete buffoon and see it for the stupidity it is.”
So by neglecting the importance of history, we could create our own Johnsons and Rees-Moggs?
“Sure we’re well on the way! If we’re really honest about it here, there will be an attempt to rewrite the history of the Northern Troubles. What kind of gloss will be put on that? We have to know about these things and understand the successes as well as the weaknesses. And you can only understand that if you research it and spend time thinking about it.”
So, since they say anyone who forgets or ignores history is condemned to repeating it, and he’s just researched the history of the first All-Ireland hurling championship, what does he find are the key takeaways for the GAA now?
For him, a glaring one is that 131 years on from that first All-Ireland hurling championship, hurling is still pretty much confined to the same handful of counties.
“That is the great question for the Gaelic Athletic Association and for people who love hurling — if we consider hurling to be such a great game, the greatest game in the world, why is it played by so few people? Why is it, at best, second-rate and ultimately, third- or fourth-rate in large swathes of the country? It’s a question that hasn’t been properly answered.”
In the book he explains that at the time, it was harder to procure equipment for hurling than it was for football. And that it was harder to get to a level of reasonable competence in it than in football, something that still holds today.
“It’s doable though,” he counters. “There was no hurling in Wexford in those years. Wexford go on and win All-Irelands. The same with Waterford. And if anyone wants to look at what can be done — look at the growth of hurling in Dublin in recent years. It’s about putting people on the ground to teach the game.”
It’s a matter of will and imagination. This writer and Dónal Óg Cusack have previously floated the idea of a Team Ulster, a flagship team and model which could then be rolled out to a Rest of Connacht. For Rouse, “it’s such an obvious thing [to do].”
But as Liam Griffin observed some time ago, while the county system had predominantly served football well and Munster hurling well, it had not, in general, served hurling well.
“No, it hasn’t,” concurs Rouse. “The way the territorial structure works in the GAA, whether it’s parish boundaries or county boundaries, is both the strength of hurling in that it promotes really intense rivalries where the game is strong but it’s also its greatest weakness in that it’s an impediment to the spread of the game. And the GAA has not demonstrated a flexibility of thinking to get beyond that.
“Because you really have to look at the country in two different ways when it comes to hurling — beneath the Dublin-Galway axis and above it. And it’s very difficult to look at it any other way than those people above that line have been failed.
“If you look at any sport or any successful county, it starts at the bottom with coaching in the clubs and schools and with proper underage competitions. Until you do that you are going nowhere.
“We can talk all we want about putting hurling into London or Boston and all these places when we first have to ask the question: why have we failed to put it into large swathes of the country above the Dublin-Galway axis?”
Is it just because it’s too much work? Something you won’t see pay dividends in the next 10 years?
“Because it requires deep pockets and it’s a generational commitment. And it also requires people to throw down the games they already love, most particularly Gaelic football.”
That though is a whole other story. There are so many other things Paul Rouse has to say and that can be said about Paul Rouse. Such as that his stint managing Offaly this summer is as fascinating to hear about as he found it a privilege to experience, only there’s so much more to get through. He’s a one-man hot-take, someone who could go against a Dunphy or Brolly or Stephen A Smith and beat them, his intellectual rigour based in facts, trumping their bombast.
He’s stridently against a tiered championship. “In fact, I reject the question. Our calendar is a disaster. And there is a complete lack of will to engage with the moving parts that are on it. Until that is done, just changing our senior championship is to take the lipstick-on-a-pig approach.”
He’s ardently in favour of camogie and ladies football being fully integrated into the GAA. “The most magnificent change in Gaelic Games has been the development of ladies football. But women are still discriminated against in GAA and the argument that they’re not doesn’t hold water.
“There should be ladies football and camogie in every club. What they’ll add to a club is way more than any problems it will cause. How can the GAA talk about community and not properly involve the female membership? Either we’re a community organisation or we’re not a community organisation.”
And that’s just a taste of a conversation with him. Someone ought to give him a column.
- Paul Rouse writes every Friday for the Irish Examiner. His book, The Hurlers: The First All-Ireland Championship and the Making of Modern Hurling, published by Penguin Ireland, is out now.
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